Multi-Focus Image Fusion based on Gradient Transform
This addresses image fusion challenges like shift variance for applications requiring fully focused images, but it appears incremental as it builds on existing gradient and fusion techniques.
The paper tackles multi-focus image fusion by proposing a gradient-based method using Halftoning-Inverse Halftoning transform and focus measurements, achieving 83.3% success by ranking first in five out of six objective metrics.
Multi-focus image fusion is a challenging field of study that aims to provide a completely focused image by integrating focused and un-focused pixels. Most existing methods suffer from shift variance, misregistered images, and data-dependent. In this study, we introduce a novel gradient information-based multi-focus image fusion method that is robust for the aforementioned problems. The proposed method first generates gradient images from original images by using Halftoning-Inverse Halftoning (H-IH) transform. Then, Energy of Gradient (EOG) and Standard Deviation functions are used as the focus measurement on the gradient images to form a fused image. Finally, in order to enhance the fused image a decision fusion approach is applied with the majority voting method. The proposed method is compared with 17 different novel and conventional techniques both visually and objectively. For objective evaluation, 6 different quantitative metrics are used. It is observed that the proposed method is promising according to visual evaluation and 83.3% success is achieved by being first in five out of six metrics according to objective evaluation.